The Second Son (10 page)

He was spending the holidays with us that year. Dad was always happy to see him. It meant he would have someone to drink with and talk about the good old days. On Boxing Day, Dad and Uncle Angus started out with eye-openers and moved on to the hair of the dog that bit them. I remember thinking it must really work. Not only did it cure them of the headaches they complained of earlier, it made them so cheerful they were joking around with us kids, even playing with some of the toys we had gotten for Christmas.

Aunt Sissy had driven down from Lancaster, where she was visiting with Aunt Gertie. She was still working in Montreal then and had her own car, I forget which kind. I don’t think she had started yet to go steady with Roddy McHugh. It was just the four of them in the parlour, having a gabfest in the late afternoon. By that time Uncle Angus and my dad were into the Drambuie. Andrew and I were playing with our new train set, laid out on the parlour floor. I was all ears as Uncle Angus got louder and louder. Somehow they got onto the topic of Grandma Bessie.

“Do you remember the time,” Uncle Angus asked, “when she made that big batch of donuts? On a Friday night, wasn’t it? Anyways, she filled the house with the smell of those damn donuts, but damned if she’d let us have any. She was saving them for her company on Sunday, don’t ya know.”

“You sound like an American,” my mother said.

Aunt Sissy started to laugh. “She filled a big crock and put them down in the cold cellar. Forbade you boys to go near them.”

Now Uncle Angus laughed, his red face glowing at the thought of his stepmother’s comeuppance. “So her fancy friends, the McLeods, came calling on Sunday afternoon.” He laughed some more and went on, “Old Bessie was some surprised when she went down in the dark to get them donuts. She lifted the lid and jammed her fingers against solid clay. ’Cause Gerry and I had emptied her damn old crock and turned it upside down, with the lid on top. We could hear her yelling clear out to the barn.”

“And why wouldn’t she?” my mother asked. “When she went out to the yard to look for you and saw the rest of her donuts hanging on the chickens’ necks? Chickens, running around the yard with donuts around their necks. Good food gone to waste and her with nothing to feed her company. Some joke.” Everybody but my mother was laughing. “You boys never gave her a chance to like you,” she added, “right from the start.”

“There you go again, Lorna, making excuses for her,” Sissy said. “She stole Andrew from us. How can you forgive her?”

“She didn’t steal him. She was an older woman who couldn’t have kids of her own. It was only natural she made more of a fuss over the youngest. He needed the love, after losing his mother.”

“We all lost our mother, Lorna,” Aunt Sissy said. “And you know darn well she always treated Andy different, giving him store-bought cornflakes and cream off the top of the jar, while the rest of us ate whatever was in the pot.”

“Yeah,” echoed Uncle Angus, “when the guys on the base wonder why I think the food is so great I tell them anything would be better than Bessie Weir’s cooking. That woman boiled the life out everything she ever cooked, until it was all just tasteless mush. Might as well have lived on porridge.”

“Oh, God,” Aunt Sissy exclaimed, “don’t remind me of that jeezly porridge. She’d make me swallow it down every morning, boiled lumpy paste you wouldn’t feed to the hogs. Stood over me with a wooden spoon till I ate every last bit of it. And there was Andy, sitting across from me with a big grin on his face, eating his bowl of cornflakes. Many’s the day I’d head off to school, only to vomit it all up in the bushes down by the road.”

“I remember that,” Angus said, looking at my mother. “You can’t defend that, Lorna.”

“I’m not trying to. She was a difficult woman. Still, she does deserve credit for taking in five young children, at forty-seven years of age. And you boys didn’t help matters, with your constant teasing. She’d come to the back door and call for Sissy and me to help with the housework and you fools would yell back in a girl’s voice, ‘Go to hell, you old bag.’ You can be sure when we did come in there’d be the devil to pay.”

Uncle Angus didn’t laugh at that one. He seemed to be getting angrier. My dad hadn’t helped matters by bringing out the Drambuie. He would just sit there during arguments like that, with a dumb grin on his face, pouring more shots into my uncle’s glass. Poor Uncle Angus, he was happy enough on the beer but the hard stuff would turn him into a mean drunk. He blamed hard liquor for the weekend he spent in jail once, out in Edmonton. Apparently he knocked over a jukebox for playing the same song all night. It was just plain good luck the judge agreed with his taste in music and let him out with a fine and damages. I mean, imagine the odds of coming before a judge that hates “Good Night Irene” as much as you do.

It seemed like Aunt Sissy’s recollections about the porridge brought out some of that same meanness in him. “That woman deserved all the trouble we ever gave her,” he declared. “She had more goddamn rules about that goddamn house of hers than you could shake a stick at. Don’t sit in that chair, don’t play in that room, don’t touch that piano. You never could tell from one minute to the next what mood she was in. Old battle-axe would hit you across the head as quick as look at you, for no reason at all.”

My mother shook her head. “And you and Gerry fought like cats and dogs. All the time. You can’t blame her for that.”

“Aw, Lorna, you were always breaking up fights, trying to protect people. You do the same thing with your own boys. When are you going to learn you can’t keep things nice all the time? Sometimes you just have to let people fight it out, especially boys.”

“Hah!” my mother shot back at him. “Why is it the people with no kids are always the experts on raising them?”

To give my uncle credit, he actually laughed out loud at that one. “You got me there, girl.”

“I should hope so,” my mother added.

He wasn’t finished, though. “Just don’t try and tell me Bessie Weir is a bloody saint. Look how she treated poor Sissy when she got into that trouble down in Montreal. Wouldn’t even let her come home.”

“Angus,” Aunt Sissy shushed him and pointed at Andrew and me, who were listening with big ears, wondering what trouble they were talking about. She scolded him before he could say any more, “Why don’t you put your brain in gear before you open your big fat mouth?”

He put a hand in front of his mouth. “Oops, sorry, kid.”

“You should be,” my mother scolded. “Besides, Sissy didn’t need her help. And that’s enough said about that.”

I remember straining to read the expression on their faces that afternoon, trying to figure out what they were talking about. I heard other snatches of conversation over the years about some boyfriend Aunt Sissy had in Montreal, someone she’d brought home on occasion. A real loser, according to the comments I picked up. It was one of those cases where my mother might have been smarter to tell us kids the whole story, because when I got around to deciding I must be adopted — why else would they treat me so mean — it was a short leap of imagination to guess that I must be Aunt Sissy’s “trouble.” I remember thinking about it often as my own troubles multiplied, daydreaming about going to live with my
real
mother.

There were no more clues that afternoon. Uncle Angus had the bit in his mouth about Grandma Bessie and he wasn’t about to let it go. “Fine, Lorna. Only don’t try and defend her. She doesn’t deserve it, especially from you. I don’t forget what she called you, that night you tried to sneak out to the dance. And what she said about Mama.”

“Her nerves were bad,” my mother answered. “She was going through the change.”

He was shaking his head before she finished. “No excuse. What made it worse, the old man never once tried to defend us, not even you. I think she boiled the life out of him.”

I remember thinking this was great stuff as I swung my head back and forth to the rhythm of the revelations, wondering what juicy secrets were coming next.

My mother came back with, “He was caught between the devil and the deep, Angus. It was her home and her farm. She had given him a lot.”

“And don’t think the fat cow didn’t hold it over his head,” Angus growled. “She worked us all like slaves, for years. And never paid us a cent.”

“It was the Depression, for God’s sake. There was no money to be had. You know that.”

“There was money enough for her fancy clothes. Or some fancy new toy for Andy. Yet every time Dadda tried to give us some money she would stick her big nose in. I remember once when Dadda gave Gerry and me five dollars between us, to go to a dance in Dalhousie. Didn’t she make him take a dollar back, said five was too much. Two dollars! To take a girl to a dance. The woman was nuts.”

My mother smiled at him. “I don’t recall you taking too many girls to a dance.”

“Is it any goddamn wonder?” He didn’t seem to think she was funny. “It’s because of that woman that Gerry left home so young. He didn’t have to go. Now he’s buried over there, beside some godforsaken mountain in Sicily.”

“C’mon now, Angus,” my father joked as he offered him yet another drink, “you can’t blame the war on Bessie.”

I remember Angus took the drink and gave my father a look that made me nervous. He nursed his drink for a minute or two before he answered my father, “You don’t understand a goddamn thing, Ed. We lost our mother. Then that woman came along and took our father. Why do you think none of us ever came home for the holidays? Hell, her own neighbours can’t stand the nosy old biddy. She listens in on the party line, you know, all the time. Haven’t you heard what they say when they answer the phone on the Fourth? ‘Get off the line, Bessie.’ That’s the first thing they say when they pick up their phone. ‘Get off the line, Bessie.’ ”

The three of them laughed out loud, but Angus didn’t. He went on, “Andy’s the only one that’ll have anything to do with her. Me, I wouldn’t cross the street to talk to that fat old slut.”

“Angus MacRae!” my mother finally protested. “My boys are listening to this. Bessie has been a good grandmother to them. And she’s been kind to Andy, no matter what you say.”

“Yeah,” Angus sneered, “she still needs someone to work that farm of hers. Only he’s not a cute little kid anymore. He wears pants and tracks dirt into her precious house. You just watch, she’ll sell that place someday and leave him with nothing.” He shook his head in disgust. “I hope your kids understand, how she’s not our real mother. You were more of a mother to Andy than she ever was. And she stole that from you, too. You don’t have to make excuses for the rest of your life, you know. Dadda’s gone. And she soon will be.”

I think Uncle Angus must have had something there, because all I can remember my mother saying about those times was that her stepmother deserved a lot of credit for taking in a family of five kids and giving them a nice home. Over the years my mother made many excuses for Grandma Bessie, I realize now. She always had some reason why her family didn’t get together very often, and I suppose it made sense to us as children. Except for the gap in her story.

My mother was fifteen when her father remarried. From the sound of it she spent three years keeping the peace, then took the first opportunity to get out. At eighteen she finished high school and got a job in the general store in Lancaster, where she could board with Aunt Gertie. I’ve often wondered about that, if she had any choice. And why she was so quick to move out when she had longed so much to be a mother to young Andrew? And what about Sissy and her brothers? Did she feel any guilt at leaving them behind?

When I was a kid I never wondered why my mother had named Andrew after her baby brother. I assumed it was because Andrew looked so much like Uncle Andy, when he was a baby. He had that same curly blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes that the MacRaes had. My mother would show us their baby pictures and you could hardly tell them apart. I just remember being jealous. Uncle Andy lived on a farm and had horses. He was practically a cowboy, while Grandpa Landry lived in the city and sold underwear. I took for granted that I must have looked like him when he was a baby — there were no pictures to compare to. I was too young to realize there had to be another reason she called her first-born Andrew, that names were usually picked before any resemblance would be obvious. And when I started school and the kids used to tease me about being French, or having a girl’s name, I really began to resent Andrew’s good fortune. All that would come later, though, after my mother met Ed Landry, the love of her life. At least that’s what she used to call him.

MY MOTHER WAS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
. I didn’t understand that until I was older. Andrew knew. He would pore over the Eaton’s catalogue, pointing out the models who looked like our mom. “So what?” I would say. I realize now her looks had a lot to do with the way people treated her, especially my father. He used to brag about her all the time. “I’m a lucky guy,” he would say, “to have a wife who’s kept her figure.” That stuff always made me feel funny. I thought every kid’s mother was supposed to be beautiful.

I did know there was a certain frailty about her. She was a slim woman, with a fragile kind of beauty that made you think of delicate things, like porcelain dolls and crystal glass. You had this feeling she could break easily, and needed to be protected. Maybe that’s why my father always backed down. He thought he was fortunate to have her, right up until that last night in the hospital.

I can still hear him when she’d come downstairs with a fancy dress on, getting ready to go out somewhere. “You’re looking so lovely, my dear,” he would say, “I’ll be the envy of all Glengarry when I walk into the room with you on my arm.” It always embarrassed me when he would add, “I hope you won’t be ’shamed of your poor Frenchman.” I thought we were supposed to be proud to be French Canadian. I know she would always answer that she was proud to call herself a Landry.

There weren’t that many Landrys in Glengarry. It was the Gervais clan we were part of. My father’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side was Antoine Gervais, who was one of the first French Canadians to move into Alexandria. Antoine was a blacksmith and his wife had nine children who lived, which was why there were Gervais cousins all over Glengarry, some I never met. His youngest son, Isadore, was my great-grandfather. He was the big success in the family.